19 July 2013 11:41 AM

The Slow, Sad Death of Detroit

Two years ago I visited the great American city of Detroit, which today declared itself bankrupt. The article I reproduce below was criticised by some Detroit residents for concentrating on the bad things - a charge I reject, as I spent some time dealing with the attempt to regenerate through agriculture, which was new. I was also careful to mention the attempts at regeneration in the heart of the city.

Had I had more space I would have described the pleasant area around the marvellous art gallery (worth going to for the Rivera frescoes alone, but crammed with good things) , where I stayed in a former millionaire's house from the Edwardian era, converted into an excellent bed-and-breakfast. And I would have dwelt on the bizarre but rather exhilarating walk I took several times, from this zone into the actual downtown, along an almost deserted broad highway which had obviously once echoed to the rumble of streetcars. In any other US city, the equivalent district would have been too dangerous for me to walk. In Detroit, it wasn't worth anyone's while to wait for pedestrians to rob, as they are so rare. In any case, the area around was almost completely deserted. the experience was eerie, thought-provoking and enjoyable. But I know that my tastes in travel are shared by few, and I couldn't really recommend it as a weekend getaway, except to the truly adventurous. Mind you, I intend to go back and take another look at the gallery one day.

As it happens, I'd visited Detroit twice before, once in pursuit of Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein, who went there to try to portray himself as a Civil Rights hero, and was (alas) allowed to appear alongside the great and courageous Rosa Parks, then living there. I still recall with a frisson of joy at the moment when I asked Mr Adams how he dared compare himself to her (as she belonged to a tradition that was wholly non-violent) and he gave the local TV stations and reporters the chance to record my question in detail by snapping 'Who said that?' and demanding that I repeat my query, which I happily did. The other time had been in pursuit of Dr Jack Kevorkian, known in the USA as 'Doctor Death' because of his enthusiasm for what is nowadays called assisted suicide. I liked it on every occasion, and I would hate anyone to think that I sought to denigrate this fascinating and unusual place. But I still can't see how it can survive, in the long term, as a functioning city.

This was once the capital city of capitalism, the great roaring furnace at the very centre of America’s rise to world power and greatness. Stalin wanted to copy it on the banks of the Volga, but found he couldn’t replicate its spirit – or its cars.

Aldous Huxley’s great prophetic novel Brave New World was written on the assumption that the ideas of its founder, Henry Ford, especially that ‘history is bunk’, would one day take over the planet. He may yet turn out to be right.

Certainly, Ford’s desire for a world of vast mass-production factories in which the workers were paid enough to keep the economy going by buying their own products seems to be coming true. But nowadays it is mainly coming true in China and South Korea, and failing in Detroit itself.

America’s fabled rise to world power and wealth may only have been an overture to China’s seizure of world dominance.

The revolutionary artist Diego Rivera made a pilgrimage to Detroit to paint – in a gigantic, overpowering fresco – the very spirit of frenzied, unstoppable economic ferocity, ruthless, cold and majestic. Detroit’s original heart was crammed with some of the most exuberant and powerful buildings of the American mid-century: colossal, ornate theatres and cinemas, mighty hotels and department stores, all emphasising energy, movement, optimism and power.

In the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt christened the city the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’ as it turned from making Cadillacs and Fords to producing 35 per cent of America’s war production: tanks, Jeeps and B-24 bombers by the tens of thousands. The wartime expansion drew in 200,000 immigrants, many of them blacks from the South.

In the Sixties it produced its own art form, the thrilling, emotional music of Motown (now relocated to Los Angeles).

Its uneasy peace between business and unions, soothed by generous benefits and pensions, gave its name in 1950 to the so-called Treaty of Detroit, a national pact between capital and labour that lasted 30 years until Ronald Reagan broke it, and which many American workers look back on with nostalgia.

And it was one of the cities of the ‘Promised Land’, the new future sought by countless black Americans who left the bigoted, segregated American South in the hope of a new life, drawn by the high wages of the new factories, and found that the officially liberal American North was just as bigoted and segregated, just less frank about it than they were back in Dixieland.

It is a melodramatic place. How could it not be? It sits on the frontier of the United States, captured by us British in the war of 1812 and heavily fortified thereafter in case we came back (we never did, and certainly nobody would want it now). It is by common agreement the last eastern city before America opens out into the big skies of the Midwest. It was the last station on the ‘underground railroad’ by which fugitive slaves made their way to Canada and freedom before the Civil War.

Now, true to its past, Detroit is not just fading away gracefully, but noisily sick and dying, expiring as spectacularly as it once lived. Fifty years ago it was the fifth-largest city in the United States, with 1.85 million people. Now it is eleventh, with just over 700,000 people. It is likely to fall further behind as it shrinks, and as more Americans head for the Sun Belt and the flourishing South West, away from this blighted, dingy Rust Belt.

Each year at Halloween more of it is burned down in a mixture of wild destruction and insurance fraud. You can walk right through its majestic downtown in the middle of the morning and meet nobody at all. There is no danger of being mugged, as a mugger in this part of town might have to wait hours for a client.

Most of the great buildings are ghosts: hotels that haven’t seen a guest in years, department stores where the last customer left decades ago, abandoned dentists’ surgeries where the elaborate Forties chairs moulder in echoing solitude. Where there was optimism, there is now nothing but melancholy.

Sometimes the majestic hulks are brought down in giant explosions.

Sometimes they are brutally recycled, so that you can find the sad traces of a beautiful theatre’s ornate ceiling stranded madly in a multi-storey car park. But mostly they have just been left forlorn, the windows of their high floors sparkling misleadingly in the sun, but the grand doorways at street-level smeared with dust and firmly locked.

A little way out you can see the colossal wreck of the old Packard factory, a monument to the passing nature of commercial success. Once, Packard was as well-known and renowned as its rival, Cadillac. Now it is almost forgotten.

As is so common in America, with its endless space, the corpse of this enormous building has not been demolished. Why bother? Instead it has been left to decay, a dangerous wasteland of sagging roofs and jagged edges, frightening in its emptiness and silence. It is strangely moving to imagine that in my lifetime this place was a source of pride and (false) security to thousands of men.

Brave efforts are made to keep life going in the middle of the city. A few excellent restaurants do surprisingly good business in the evenings, much of it from prosperous black families. A grand hotel has been reopened. There are some dispiriting casinos, those invariable signs of economic desperation. But real life, the sort that makes for crowded pavements, exhilarating noise, bright lights and business, has departed to the far fringes of the suburbs. You can find it, for instance, out in Dearborn, where America’s biggest Arab Muslim community is forming, in unspoken defiance of the post-September 11 belief that their way of life is incompatible with America’s.

But they seldom cross the border into Detroit, perhaps having a heightened sense of approaching danger. And it is a border. As you pass the city limits a blanket of gloom, neglect and cheapness descends. The buildings are shabbier, the paint is faded. The businesses, where they exist, are thrift shops and pawn shops or wretched groceries where the goods are old and tired. Finding somewhere to have breakfast, normally easy in any American city, involves a long hunt. ‘God bless Detroit’, says one billboard, just beside another offering the alternative solution: liquor.

Nobody actually wants Detroit to perish. Many clever people have spent billions of dollars trying to revive it. General Motors, no longer the power it once was, now occupies the aggressive new Renaissance Center which stares across the river to Canada. A monorail, that favourite toy of town planners who want to look ultra-modern, circles the riverfront zone, largely empty and going from nowhere to nowhere.

Glowering over the main entrance to the city stands a tall and frowning structure, dark and dispiriting even in bright sunshine. This is the abandoned Michigan Central Railroad Station, rearing up like an enormous tombstone. It is impossible to see it without feeling a strange fear for the future. Is this how all the great cities of the mighty West will one day look?

Through here, in the lost boom years, came businessmen hastening to sign contracts, politicians looking for finance from business, unions or both, government contractors gearing up for war, Southern blacks and their families seeking a new life. Now it is a ruin, ringed by razor-wire, its windows broken, its superb arrivals hall a shadowy, chilly tomb, its many silent platforms invaded by weeds. The few remaining trains do not even come here any more. The neighbourhood is not safe after dark.

The main road that leads from here into the heart of Detroit is so worn that the asphalt has peeled away to reveal the Edwardian cobbles beneath. No doubt something can be rescued. But much has gone already. I have yet to get to the worst.

This is to be found near where Van Dyke Avenue intersects with Mack Avenue. Where prosperous, neat suburban homes once stood, pheasants flap and knee-high grass obscures the foundations of vanished homes.

Occasionally a half-ruined or half-burned house still stands to remind you that this used to be a cityscape. Pathetic, besieged knots of surviving homes remind you of what was once here. Sometimes amazing efforts have been made to keep them smart. More often, they haven’t.

Many bear menacing notices warning visitors to stay away. On the door of one, easy to imagine as a neat home with an iron-pillared porch where the head of the family must once have sat on summer evenings, are the words ‘Enter at ya own risk’ accompanied by a crude drawing of an angry face.

I ventured into a nearby ruin, smashed, charred and half-filled with garbage. You have no idea who or what might be lurking in these houses. I lacked the courage to go in any deeper than the front room, in case I plunged through a rotten floor or met somebody unpleasant. The towers of downtown, only a couple of miles away, are visible from the front porch.

But they, too, are mostly empty, and are not reassuring.

There are real perils. My photographer colleague, Brian Kersey, and I were investigating a particularly desolate street when two large and purposeful dogs, one a pit-bull, came pelting towards us. I have not run so fast since I was at school.

Not far away, the danger might well have been human. Much of Detroit is horribly dangerous for its own residents, who in many cases only stay because they have nowhere else to go. Property crime is double the American average, violent crime triple. The isolated, peeling homes, the flooded roads, the clunky, rusted old cars and the neglected front yards amid trees and groin-high grassland make you think you are in rural Alabama, not in one of the greatest industrial cities that ever existed.

Amazingly, only a short walk away, the remnants of a rich man’s quarter, the so-called Indian Village, still survive. Here the owners of spacious early 20th Century mansions keep up appearances by tending the empty houses next to them, making them look occupied, mowing the lawns and sweeping the leaves, in the hope that nobody will burn them down and spread the blight.

A journey eastwards along Mack Avenue is simply sad. The city is sinking back into the deep forests and grassy plains that were here before Europeans ever came to North America. What buildings are left are seldom used for their original purpose. A once-grand bank is a sweet shop. Sordid-looking bars sit alongside the chapels of obscure religious sects. There are whole schools with no children to attend them. Step out of the car at the petrol station and you are immediately accosted by pathetic wraith-like figures in grimy clothes, with the prematurely-aged faces of drug abusers. This is urban failure in all its shabby misery.

Maggie DeSantis, a community worker and one of the leading experts on Detroit’s decline, explains how it all went wrong. Her history is not the conventional one, of the city being ruined by a corrupt black mayor: the notorious Coleman Young. It is far, far more complicated than that.

Because Detroit was a city based on the motor car, it was different from the start. Henry Ford paid his workers enough to buy the cars they made. And they did. So houses were more spread out and built on more generous lots than in most cities. Detroit was designed for car owners, who wouldn’t dream of using public transport, which barely existed anyway.

Maggie explains: ‘Even if you had a crummy house, it was your crummy house: you owned your own home, and ran your own car. But the things that made Detroit strong, the sprawling streets and the dependence on cars, also made it weak.’

When trouble came, the city was too widespread, the people too far from each other, the lives too individual, the temptation to flee to the remote edge of town too strong. It was fine to live in such a place when you had a job and a car. But if you didn’t, you were trapped and alone, left with a debt-burdened property you couldn’t sell and couldn’t leave.

The first tremors of change came with the war, but they intensified in the Fifties when blacks began moving out of the ghetto in the old centre. This district was typical of America before Martin Luther King. Known as ‘The Black Bottom’ or more politely as ‘Paradise Valley’, it was a complete society, in which the son of a labourer could and did grow up next door to the son of a doctor or a lawyer, and go to the same school.

But when Detroit became the first American city to surrender to the motorway, it had an excuse to break up this vibrant but squalid enclave. Black Americans began moving into the Detroit suburbs.

DeSantis has no doubt the planners meant to destroy the ghetto. Blacks who had come from Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi, enticed by high wages and hoping for a life free of prejudice, found a cold welcome in the rest of the city.

Detroit in those days was notorious for its thriving Ku Klux Klan and its bigoted police force. The city had suffered race riots as far back as 1943, caused by the crude segregation of hastily built and rare public housing.

The battles were so serious that in the midst of a war, thousands of troops were needed to restore order, 34 people died and hundreds were injured.

So, when thousands of displaced black families relocated, estate agents sought to profit by scaring white residents out. Then they bought their houses cheaply, and sold them at a heavy profit to black incomers. This cynical process was called ‘block-busting’, a technique of panicking people in entire districts into leaving, with coded warnings of black invasion.

DeSantis recalls: ‘I remember them using scare tactics. I remember in my Fifties neighbourhood, posters saying, “Sell for cash and get out while you can.” ’

Meanwhile, the city planners were encouraging still more blight. Because this was the City of Cars, rather than maintain or extend public transport, they built a web of motorways which encouraged more sprawl and broke up settled neighbourhoods. Better-off whites began to move beyond the city limits into new suburbs with lower taxes and superior schools.

Then in 1967 the city’s name was besmirched so badly it has never recovered. A second terrible race riot left 43 dead and nearly 500 injured. Federal troops, deployed under an anti-insurrection law dating back to 1807, eventually imposed a sullen peace.

Already, inch by inch, and largely thanks to whites moving out, Detroit was becoming a black majority city. The 1967 disaster speeded up the process. In 1974 it elected its first black mayor, Coleman Young. He would later become notorious as the man who helped kill Detroit. His election, fairly or unfairly, was a signal for faster white flight. DeSantis says Young has been unfairly blamed, and that the disaster had already begun to happen. Both versions probably have some truth in them.

But it was the 1973 Middle East war, and the ensuing oil price rise, which finally tipped Detroit over the edge and down the slope into unstoppable decline. From that moment, its big fat petrol-slurping monster cars were obsolete. The US car industry lost the confidence even of patriotic Americans, and has never fully regained it.

Meanwhile, the housing crisis grew and grew. There was already a stupid, state-encouraged mortgage boom, with the government lending to people who could never pay off their loans: an early version of the sub-prime crisis. The first crack cocaine made its appearance, sweeping through the listless, gap-toothed, jobless suburbs.

And the local politicians and businessmen floundered. As DeSantis puts it: ‘We could not get a grip on the fact that we were no longer in the top ten cities of the USA.’ They still cannot. It may take a while yet before Detroit can admit that it is probably just doomed to decline.

The most dramatic development in recent years is the idea that farming might return in the new ‘prairies’ where the city has died. But even this has met with scorn and opposition. The city fathers do not really want to see combine harvesters and barns, let alone pigs and chickens, in the middle of their proud and historic cityscape.

And yet, out among the derelict houses, a modest but determined effort is being made to turn the new badlands to good use. In a bleak corner of the city echoing to the hooters of freight trains, I found Mike Score, of Hantz Farms, cleaning up the site of some derelict houses. ‘I’ve just shifted 400 tyres, plus 200 cubic yards of garbage and waste,’ he said, happily. Detroit has plenty of garbage and debris. But it also has plenty of land. House sites can be bought from the city for $300 (£190), each, which adds up to $3,000 an acre, exactly the price of good farmland outside the city limits.

Mike is going to block off one end of the street to stop the fly-tipping of yet more old tyres on this modest plot. Then he explains what comes next: ‘The city thought a farm meant a big red barn, with pigs and chickens. And they also thought red barns, pigs and chickens would be negative, a sign of defeat and failure. So we drew them a picture of what we meant: orchards, hardwood plantations, gardens, hydroponic greenhouses.’

He says it’s time Detroit had a new trademark, instead of the Renaissance Center, which everyone knows has not led to a renaissance. Why not civilised, cultivated green space where wilderness now is? He says with unfeigned enthusiasm: ‘I want this to be one of the landmarks of this city.’

He can see I’m disappointed by his modest ambitions, which really amount to a little bit of market gardening, not much more agricultural than an English allotment. ‘No, no corn, no sheep, no cattle’, he admits.

But if the city decides to encourage the plan, 40 out of its total area of 139 square miles are estimated to be vacant lots. With the true level of unemployment touching 50 per cent, there are plenty of people who might be interested in returning to the land.

The founder of the farming business, John Hantz, was the one who had the idea. Mike Score recalls: ‘He was driving to work past yet another closed business, yet another burnt out house. He realised that the city wouldn’t do anything about it. And eventually, he concluded that if he didn’t do anything, nobody would.’

It’s impossible to say if this will come to anything. My own guess is that the most likely crop to flourish on these sad fields will be cannabis, grown to satisfy a rising demand for ‘medical marijuana’, the cover under which the supposedly draconian United States is quietly legalising this drug in many states – including here in Michigan.

Another even more radical scheme for resurrecting the dead centre has come from Geoffrey Fieger, a Detroit lawyer who made his name defending the late Dr Jack Kevorkian or ‘Doctor Death’, the notorious local pioneer of assisted suicide. Having represented death, Fieger has now turned his attention to resurrection. He recently declared: ‘I could turn it (Detroit) around in five minutes.

‘I’d shovel the snow and I’d clean the streets and parks. Then, I’d tell the police department to leave marijuana alone and don’t spend one dime trying to enforce marijuana laws. I also would not enforce prostitution laws and I’d make us the new Amsterdam.We would attract young people. You make Detroit a fun city. A place they want to live and they would flock here.’

Since Fieger was the Democratic Party’s candidate for Governor of Michigan in 1998, he cannot be easily dismissed as a fringe wacko figure.

But if Detroit, once the mighty arsenal of democracy, is going to descend into being a patchwork Babylon of girly bars, brothels, casinos, druggy coffee shops, allotments and hydroponic cannabis farms, it is more likely to do it gradually and accidentally than as the result of a deliberate decision.

I came here soon after an equally unsettling visit to another empty city, Kangbashi in Inner Mongolia. There, the people are yet to come. Here they are going, and one day they may all have gone, leaving a strange green hole and some melancholy ruins where a mighty civilisation used to be.

Sincere and thoughtful men and women are doing all they can to save it from this fate. But that only makes the scene sadder and more dispiriting.

They have been trying to rescue Detroit for years, and for years Detroit has continued to be sucked back into the ground from which it was born.

Just as in China you can hear the roar and thunder of growth and ambition and the shouts of greed and triumph, in Detroit you can hear the whispers and sighs of decay and decline. For more than two centuries, America balanced on top of a wave of growth and power like a triumphant surf rider. Now she wallows in decline and the rest of us wait to see what that will bring.

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Joshau Wooderson, I undertand the point you make regarding patents. They are mostly anti-competitive and should be replaced with a time-limited licensing system. Health services around the world, for example, whether they be private or state-run, would benefit from lower drug costs.

Patents are an example of a ‘dominant position’ (‘economic rents’ as economists call them) that large monopolistic players use to game the free-market system to their advantage. Of course it is masqueraded by ‘many true capitalists’(!?) as being inherent to the capitalist model. Another economic rent example would be ‘externalities’ - costs not bourn by the instigator - such as oil company pollution costs.

…But who are the ‘true capitalists’? I think it is term argued over as much as the term socialism is argued over by socialists. I would predict that Mev would place himself near the front of any capitalist queue, whilst at the same time, probably wanting to exclude me from it. So when I write that capitalism should be about ‘expanding the means of production’, I use it to allude to more effective means of competition and of more inclusive methods of decision making. In practice this could be achieved by more co-operatives or by having more employer representation on company boards (similar to the German system, which most would perceive as being capitalist).

Mev, you seem to have a misplaced affection for a form of capitalism that has been in the descendant since the early 1900’s. I agree with you that small government is a good in itself. However - unless we also make changes to our current economic system - we would only end up hastening the onset of our future - which I believe could be a type of ‘Robo-Cop’ dystopia. The type of capitalism which you describe flourished during the 18th/19th centuries, driven by private enterprise, entrepreneurs and inventors.

I agree that we need more innovators and free-marketeers, instead we have an unhealthy cocktail of corporate types and oligarchs. Real free-market economics has been subverted by monopoly and local economies have been subsumed. Interestingly, in countries that operate federal systems of government, such as Germany, local economics have trumped short term global imperatives. Structurally, capitalism is now biased toward asset accumulation and financial speculation and where international markets trump government control, including tax collection (a Ponzi scheme with wealth being continually withdrawn). Capitalism should be about the expansion of the means of production - in practice this means less ‘chaotic City of London Finance’, and more real industries like the ‘German Mittelstand’. The benefits would be stable economies, motivated and productive individuals performing real jobs, and locally generated wealth.

A return to a ‘real’ economy could be achieved through changes to our tax system, making it simpler/transparent and by encouraging local investment and discouraging the distortive financial market trading. By the early 1900’s, it was recognised that all the low-hanging fruits (easy benefits) of capitalism had been harvested, and simply continuing to roll-out global capitalism was not the answer. None of this idelogical and Chesterton, Marx, Adam Smith, Keynes all wrote about the dangers of unrestrained enterprise and unregulated markets which merely become elitist and self-serving, distort the real economy, stifle competition and are ultimately dangerously unstable.

The answer is small government - but only so long as similar restraints on business are also effected - meaning more small government AND more small business. One without the other - that would just be bad medicine.

We have seen the tragic outcomes for the finance sector where business interests coincide with short term political imperatives. But the latest example of state/business collusion is that of Google and Face Book. We are being told that ‘if we have nothing to hide, we have nothing to fear’! Really? What has happened to the ‘right’ to privacy? We’ve heard that the banks enjoyed a business model that privatised the profits and socialised the losses. But it seems that the I.T. companies will be allowed to go straight for the jugular - and have begun to privatise peoples’ social lives. Drug companies began patenting our genes long ago. These examples of capitalism encroaching into the private life of an individual should be raising important questions about lost freedoms. Private firms ‘comodifying’ the individual is bad enough, but all with state backing is truly alarming.

James Kunstler also web-logged recently about Detroit (no surprise) but he recounts a similar, very odd experience driving up a six or eight-lane highway in or around the city centre. His was literally the only car on the road until after a good mile another car came towards him travelling in the same lane and blowing its horn angrily. He had been going the wrong way up a one-way street.

"The main problem with Detroit is that it was developed to produce automobiles and, with very few exceptions, American cars have never been much good, they had huge lazy engines...."
Posted by: Michael Williamson | 20 July 2013 at 05:53 PM

...and now, moving ahead to modern times...Ford bought Mazda and has benefited from being able to integrate their technology, but the trouble is their cars are more expensive even then Subaru, but not as overpriced as the Fiat or the Mini Cooper.

Everyone knows that the clock was set ticking with the massive de-regulation under Reagan in the 80s, and to this extent I guess you could say "it was all the government's fault'.
Posted by: Paul P | 23 July 2013 at 10:36 AM

I agree with you on this but I don't think it's just a matter of the government de-regulating. It's also the corporations that want the de-regulation. If they didn't mind it, Wall Street wouldn't have been fighting the post recession attempts at greater regulation. So, there's no way around it; we can't just blame the politicians.

I was listening to National Public Radio, (which I know has a liberal slant, but it's not as bad as Free Speech Radio or MSNBC) and in the discussion it was pointed out that the period with the most economic stability in the US was post Depression up until the early 80's. It was during this period of time that the market was fairly well regulated. I have also heard it pointed out that Canada fared much better than many other countries in this Great Recession and their markets had been more tightly regulated then many others.

"This condition is felt all the more harshly in America where socialist 'cushioning' is the thinnest in the western world. It also very rarely makes it to primetime TV, the principle advertising agency for the American Dream, so few Americans get to know of the pockets of extreme poverty and destitution in the USA, which rank with the world's worst."

I'm not sure that more socialist "cushioning" is going to help overcome the poverty in America and I certainly don't think we want to follow Britain's socialist model. Eighteen months of unemployment insurance should be adequate, except in special circumstances, such as with this recession when it was extended. If someone hasn't found the work that they desire by that point, they really need to do any work they can. I've seen how difficult unemployment can be psychologically (when my father was unemployed for a year, my husband for a year and a half and my brother for 2 years) and it does more harm than good, I think, to extend unemployment benefits for an unreasonable length of time. The main fault in our socialist cushioning is the lack of health care available to the unemployed or the working poor.
To some extent the need for subsidies that we give to the working poor (food stamps, subsidized housing, medicaid, free lunch) could be reduced if the minimum wage kept pace with the cost of living. And the greatest period of growth in the middle class occurred at a time when the income of the top 1-2% was growing the slowest. It seems to me that these are some ways that income disparity increases, but providing more benefits wouldn't help resolve these issues and they might just create more problems.

Your now splitting the difference between freemarketerrs and capitalists - yawn - but you started out with weird comments about capitalists moving on to green lawns anew leaving a trail of exploited destruction behind them. Yep - exploiters when present - uncaring discarders when not present - they can't win in Paul's world. Perhaps Paul might like to set up a company and treat his workers the way he believes they should be treated. No didn't think so.

Sorry Mev but I have to write off your entire reply. It falls squarely within the pale of the generic "It's all the government's fault", and is thus supremely trite. I've heard it so many times, especially in the US. It's the fallback routine of all Republican argument.

Everyone knows that the clock was set ticking with the massive de-regulation under Reagan in the 80s, and to this extent I guess you could say "it was all the government's fault'. The natural hysteresis in the system effected the delay in the inevitable collapse during which illusory prosperity was enjoyed.

As to "Free marketeers do not support rigged markets or cartels", I never said they did. I said capitalists supported rigged markets and cartels. Capitalists are not free marketeers. They are monopolists engaged in the bringing about of monopolies if they can possibly do so, their own. For the purpose of this point I am of course not referring to dime store proprietors but corporate capitalists at the highest, driving force level. I daresay any given dime store capitalist would happily torch the other without a second thought, but there's no need to dwell at this level.

So Mev, try and extricate yourself from the bog of particularisms about employee relationships and pension fund provisions and private savings and the rest and try and see the big picture. More particularly, try and get out more. You won't see the glacier moving if you are on your knees examining ice crystals.

The sub prime mortgage bubble was caused by US politicians with socialist tendencies interfering in the mortgage market with fannie mae and freddie mac to offer loans to unsuitable borrowers, because they wanted to look like they were supporting the deserving poor - and it just went to prove you can't buck the market - no matter how much politicians and socialists try.

Your categorisation of people into 'capitalists' and 'exploited' is daft - as if they were either Lords and serfs and stamped for life into those respective categories.
Everyone is free to take part in the free market economy - moving according to their efforts and skills up and down the wealth ladder. Many (most?) people have some pension funds or savings and hence take part in the market on the side of the business owners. Employers and the employed bargain against one another until the correct wage is determined for the skills and effort concerned. If prices were 'false' due to unwarranted 'exploitation' (that word so favoured by angry sixth formers) then other people businesses would enter the market to undercut and hence remove the unfair price from both directions.

Your Enron point is silly - no one defends fraud, and those responsible have been jailed.

Free marketeers do not support rigged markets or cartels - they occur when politicians interfere in the free market, often in favour of their big business friends, who make friends with politicians because the politicians are able to influence the market. End their influence by reducing the size and power of government and the playing field is levelled out again.

Is it generally the case that you are moved to groaning upon hearing how things actually work? Does actuality bore you?

In the case of capitalism do you hold the view that it works in some other way?, to achieve different ends and goals other than the making of money for capitalists? Do you hold the view that the material well-being - transient in the case of Detroit - of the exploited is something the capitalists effect on purpose?, say out of the goodness of their hearts?

Is the capitalists' belief in, and rigorous pursuit of, the rigged market, the cartel and the fixed price something that squares with your preferred version of economics? What of the investors in and the employees of the defunct Enron? Was it their fault, the greedy b*ggers? Is the summary uprooting of entire community-dependant enterprises to China - but not the boardroom staff - something that you can happily place within the pale of 'that's just too bad', and think no more of it?

Before you groan out more benedictions at the altar of unfettered capitalism perhaps you could nauseate us a quick review of the sub-prime catastrophe and how it took the world to the brink of economic meltdown. Were the granting of mortgages to people (a.k.a. suckers, punters, the ones we saw coming) solely on the basis of their drawing breath acts of capitalist kindness?, or were they in any way associated with going in quick and getting out fast on the understanding in the newly unregulated regime of limitless profit potential that, if x didn't blow up this bubble, y would?

Having gone in quick the sub-prime lenders got out fast by selling-on the debt to boardroom bankers with dollar signs etched into their corneas. That some of them are now taking their lunches at refectory tales in the company of other orange jump suits speaks well of the intrinsic kindness that one often fails to credit the top-of-the-line capitalist, don't you think?

"I think this is an indictment of how capitalism can and will go horribly wrong in the way it is currently prescribed."
" It's generally fine for the capitalists; they simply move on, always within and enjoying the hegemony of money, to manicured lawns-anew. [ ] . Those whom the capitalists exploited are left behind to shovel the rubble that once were factories employing them into the leviathans servicing the new freeway constructions, freeways that now just pass through. After that's done?? Who cares."

"Capitalism goes wrong"? What? Because the world of commerce is constantly changing and people and businesses have to change and adapt?
For goodness sake.
I imagine these guys bemoan the fate of the sedan chair carriers of China and the large leaf wafters of humid ancient Greece and wish we could re-introduce the slavery system that kept them in gainful employment.
Or how about all the governments spies and evesdroppers in the old communist eastern block countries - if only we could bring back that system, hey?
(Have they seen the brilliant and damning indictment of communism that is the film 'The Lives of Others'?)

And just how did those 'capitalists' (do they have green skin and come from the planet zog? being so noticeable different from the rest of the population) 'exploit' these poor souls? - err, by freely offering them jobs that they voluntarily chose to take because they obviously calculated it was better than whatever their next available option was - yes that's it - gosh! - such evil in our midst!

Oh but then we have to have it both ways don't we? When the evil green headed 'capitalists' choose to no longer make a car for 10,000 dollars that can only be sold for 8000 dollars and close their factory, these pair of moaning minnies bemoan the fact that the 'poor people' are no longer being 'exploited'!
(Of course I'm sure these pair of good hearted philanthropists always choose the most expensive shops to purchase their products, don't they. They'll no doubt be happy to keep inefficient or overpricing shopkeepers in the manner to which they've become accustomed won't they?)

Well I'm sure all the old Detroit workers will all be very relieved to go back to whatever method of sustaining themselves they had before the evil job providers turned up won't they?

"You mention the "thriving Klu Klux Klan", but fail to mention that Detroit was the birth place of the virulently racist Nation of Islam."
Matthew

Which is a good example of how hate generally begets hate.

P.S. Brian Merideth,
I think I also agree with the contributor that mentioned how the cost of labor hurt the American car industry. It was probably a combination of things: lack of innovation and engineering that did not keep pace with Japan, standards in fuel efficiency that fell behind the Japanese and high labor costs.

Brian Merideth,
Yes, I can believe that your compact sized Chevy would not have been too common. This isn't Italy and we have not yet reached that level of thinking, even though I'm sure many people could do just fine with a compact sized car.

But if Americans didn't care about fuel efficiency I don't think the Toyota Corolla and the Honda Civic (small sized vehicles) would have been the top selling cars for so long (at least that was the case not long ago) They sell even better then the Toyota Camry and the Honda Accord which are mid-size cars..... (By the way, my husband used to sell cars. That's really the only reason I feel like I can talk about this a little bit. Personally I have little interest in cars, except to find the most dependable one with good fuel efficiency at the best price)

I also don't think the American car companies would spend so much time emphasizing fuel efficiency if people didn't care. They are also obviously trying to keep up with the new trend in hybrid cars which I don't think they would be doing if there wasn't a market for it. We haven't felt like the hybrids are worth it because they cost so much more so it takes too long before they even make it a good financial investment. And in our search for a car that my husband could use for his work, which takes him way off road, we decided on a cross between a sedan and an SUV. It had enough clearance for off road use with the needed AWD but with good fuel efficiency. It was the Subaru Outback. A very popular car in the mountain west.

You do still see a lot of big SUVs. Some people might need them. That's not for me to judge, but I'm sure some people may still see it as a status symbol.

"I think this is an indictment of how capitalism can and will go horribly wrong in the way it is currently prescribed."

I think this is slightly misleading in that it ignores the relative nature of capitalism. It's generally fine for the capitalists; they simply move on, always within and enjoying the hegemony of money, to manicured lawns-anew. Country club memberships are simply transferred. Those whom the capitalists exploited are left behind to shovel the rubble that once were factories employing them into the leviathans servicing the new freeway constructions, freeways that now just pass through. After that's done?? Who cares.

The process is heart renderingly inevitable, and poignantly so, especially in consideration of those left behind, bewildered and innocent, those who thought the capitalists, their fellow countrymen, were on their side.

Capital free to move moves to where it makes the most profit at the lowest cost, much in the manner of water always finding the bottom of the valley floor. This process cannot be stopped and still be called capitalism. The capitalists (and we may also say the capitalist system) will be all over you when you are supplying the profits, but once that role is redundant you cease to exist.

This condition is felt all the more harshly in America where socialist 'cushioning' is the thinnest in the western world. It also very rarely makes it to primetime TV, the principle advertising agency for the American Dream, so few Americans get to know of the pockets of extreme poverty and destitution in the USA, which rank with the world's worst. According to a special report from the U.S. Census Bureau, 46.2 million Americans are now living in poverty. That is roughly twice the entire population of Australia.

Elaine:
Very glad to hear that the Hummer is discontinued, although the 6.3 litre Cadillac Escalade doesn't look so very different, particularly when it fills your rear-view mirror. You ask how long since I was in the USA? Last time was in 2010 when I drove all the way from Chicago to Santa Monica (yep, that corny ol' Route 66 trip) in a compact Chevrolet. Saw an awful lot of vehicles though. In every state, on every motel lot, every Walmart car park, my little Chevvie was positively dwarfed by all the Chrysler Voyagers, Toyota Land Cruisers and sundry German 4wd vehicles mostly the size of a staff bus. The footprint of these vehicles may be smaller than days of yore but since they tend to resemble a lump of dough, I couldn't help thinking at the time that if you rolled one out flat you'd probably end up with something like a Lincoln Continental.

'The Downfall of Detroit' by Mark Steyn over at Steynonline is a must read for anybody who enjoyed, if "enjoy" is the correct word, this article about the demise of this once great city by our host Peter Hitchens.

There is almost a terrible beauty about places like Detroit described like this and you have to wonder where this could happen next - Silicon Valley....London....? I think this is an indictment of how capitalism can and will go horribly wrong in the way it is currently prescribed.

What troubles me, after reading your post, is the question of quantifying 'deeply'.
Clearly, there are some (many?) who are troubled by changes that have taken place in recent decades. If one is by nature a pessimist - and it would appear you are, or perhaps a 'realist' would be your own verdict - that is understandable. But I'm sure you would agree that there are also 'many' who face life for themselves and their families with a brighter outlook simply because they are aware that the alternative is a slippery road to the collapse you forecast. Life has always been a series of ups and downs - feasting on the 'downs' always seems to me to be the wrong road to take.

Detroit made too many gas-guzzlers? It wasn't until GM and Chrysler declared bankruptcy a few years ago that we learned the real reason for Detroit's dependence on large automobiles: monstrously high labor costs. The car companies were paying union workers $30 an hour to STAY HOME. The car companies had to build big vehicles with better profit margins just to stay in business. It finally caught up with them.

Direct comparisons between Detroit and Coventry would probably be a bit silly. But Peter did write a fairly lengthy piece about Coventry on this blog, which was published on 15 November 2012 and was entitled "Sinking into the sofa" (I won't link to it as apparently this blog doesn't accept links, you can find it easily enough in the archive).

Peter apparently also lived in Earlsdon for a while in the 1970s. I did ask him whereabouts, purely from curiosity, and would still be very interested to know.

Very good article, I'm considering buying Charlie LeDuff''s Autopsy for an insider's view of Detroit's fall. Even though the man is low on integrity I enjoyed watching Michael Moore's Roger & Me which details the decline of Flint, Michigan when GM laid off thousands in that city. Our motor industry has gone the same way but I'm not sure if we ever had communities built around car factories the way some were with coal.

Don't listen to Jack Tunstall, Peter, you're magnificent at religion too. And education. You've just got to flesh out the "let's all emigrate" idea a bit: either say how (and where) it can happen, or tell us it was just a hoax.

The main problem with Detroit is that it was developed to produce automobiles and, with very few exceptions, American cars have never been much good, they had huge lazy engines whch ran trouble free for hundreds of thousands of miles, but their suspensions were so soft that they could bring on sea-sickness they also had severe problems negotiating bends at speed. None of this mattered when freeways were long straight runs and well maintained, the cars were cheap due to tarrifs and all the major manufactures produced new models every year, and fuel was amazingly inexpensive.

Then came the oil crisis with a sharp rise in the cost of fuel and a blanket 50mph speed limit across the land, Ralph Nader wrote a book which had sold a handful of copies but General Motors took exception to it and tried to discredit him which ended with the humiliating spectacle of their CEO having to apologise to him in public. They completely failed to respond to new conditions and foreign manufacturers began to invade, eventually it ended in bankruptcy and 'What was good for General Motors' was no longer good for America.

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